Welcome back. I realise that I left off without telling you how I’d chosen to wire the matrix up. I’m basing my layout on the Jesse’s “Blue Shift” layout:

Where were we? Ah yes, I’d just unwired my Maltron, pulled out all the switches, ordered some Cherry MX brown stem keyswitches from a Deskthority Group buy and a Teensy++ from Pieter Floris. Now all I had to do was work out how I was going to wire the thing up. Jesse’s article had some great pointers, but as I disassembled the Maltron wiring loom, I gained a great deal of respect for their decision to use fine enamelled wire (which a bit of googling revealed to be solderable copper magnet winding wire - I bought some 30SWG stuff from wires.co.uk) which, because it’s thin and solid core is easy to bend into shape and, because the enamel coating melts into solder flux, is easy to solder without worrying about stripping insulation.

Some years ago (I have the awful feeling it was 1999) I was stricken with a bout of tingly numbness in my right hand. When you’re a computer programmer, the thought of being unable to type, and thus unable to program isn’t something you ever want to deal with. Terry Pratchett’s words about gnawing the arse out of a dead badger if it would make it better spring to mind. So, I replaced my mouse with a trackball, got a better chair and invested three hundred and some pounds of my own money in a Maltron keyboard.

I had such fun. Though I’m never, ever, livecoding half an unwritten talk in an Emacs window again.

You want proof?

Today is Alan Turing’s 100th birthday. I’ve been thinking about him lately, in particular about a story that demonstrates the perils of working with genius.

Two bulls were grazing at the bottom of the big pasture, when the farmer let a load of heifers in at the top gate.

“Hey,” said the young bull to the old, “What do you say we run up there and fuck us a couple of heifers?”

http://soundcloud.com/pdcawley/pretty-saro

I sometimes think that I should have published the lyrics to Child of the Library with a bibliography. The references in the second verse are all obvious to me, but I’m a white middle class English boy who grew up around boats. My childhood reading and yours may not intersect all that much.

Or… what I did this summer.

Summer as been frantic. Mostly joyous, but frantic.

I had talks accepted at both YAPC and OSCON. Because YAPC was in Asheville, and the Swannanoa Gathering Traditional Song Week fell the week after YAPC, that meant I flew out to Asheville for an intense fortnight of Perl community engagement followed by a week spent singing myself hoarse and being blown away by Sheila Kay Adams’s singing and her stories of mountain life and listening to future stars like Sam Gleaves and inspiring activists like Saro Lynch Thomason. I could write entire posts on every one of those, and that’s before I get on to the magic of watching the sun go down and the fireflies come up from the grass of the Warren Wilson College’s natural amphitheatre. Magical so it was.

Here’s a revised version of A Child of the Library.

http://soundcloud.com/pdcawley/lands-end/s-0xYEc

So, on Saturday, the opening line, and pretty much the entire tune, of a song banged on my head as we went to our local Library to fill our boots with books and generally get with the “Save our Libraries” message. Here it is. Sing it out. Sing it loud.

Open Ears, Open Mind, Open Mouth. Music Making Made Easy

Blurb

Our bodies are the most versatile and sophisticated musical instrument we know. From the complexities of making at beat with our hands and feet to the surprising simplicity of harmony singing, we are all of us musicians.

http://soundcloud.com/pdcawley/lottery-song

I’m working on a web service, and that means that I need to build lots and lots of mildly different looking HTTP requests with various combinations of headers and requested URLs. The camel’s back got broken this morning when I realised I didn’t want to be writing a method called ssl_request_from_uk_with_bad_cert, which builds me an HTTP::Request with a particular combination of headers, that I can use with Plack::Test to test our webservice. The method name describes what’s wanted, but the code is sopping wet and in desperate need of DRYing up.